View the video "Power of Community", http://www.powerofcommunity.org/, which documents what happened to Cuba after Russia collapsed. Cubans had to do without oil, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and deal with the US embargo.

They found that they can do without and their lives and communities got a lot better.

Of course they do have a leader, Fidel, who deeply cares for the people of Cuba, and who also sends armies of doctors abroad instead of soldiers.

They had an ethical revolution in addition to a political one.

Wonderful. Reconnecting with and understanding Nature, and its limits, is the key to a happy and healthy planet. All life forms should be respected and cherished as relatives. All life on this planet has common ancestry.

Nelson describes consumerism as the culprit. Consumerism is a product of capitalism. Forget the "stuff." Learn to be content with the basics; food, clothing, shelter, energy.

Interesting questions, but as nixon's advisor once said, 'things that don't go on forever, don't' and as with sustainability, IT WON'T EITHER with the current unfettered human growth.

There has been research into this for a while, like 1972 and here is a link that will have to be pasted into the address bar to wikipedia as to what it is about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

The author has good points, that sustainability need not be wedded to technology and consumerism, that ethics does apply here as elsewhere in human affairs.

But I have always had a moral code, and excuse the hell out of me for switching to CFLs some years ago. As economies sicken, people will turn to alternative schemes for preserving natural resources because we'll have less money, and we do care. Let's not diss those who purchased (gasp) a more earth-friendlly consumer product.

The ethics issue of the age is right there in front of us - corporate-government liars and the media's lying liars that bring them into our homes. Until they are compelled to eschew their roaring hypocrisy and begin telling the truth, everything, including the pursuit of sustainability, is at risk.

It seems to me that the first step in the development of a new ethic (which I agree is prerequisite to achieving any truly sustainable global society) is to recognize that we must consider our human selves as PART of nature, not APART from it.

If one accepts that simple and undeniable proposition, then the first question: "Is sustainability just for our human benefit, or does nature count as well?" is incoherent.

What follows from it in the authors' minds are certainly questions worth asking, given the sorry state of awareness (particularly in America) of the ecological dangers we face. But these questions don't begin to approach an ethical reappraisal of consumer society.

A new sustainability?

Since permanent war is not mentioned once yet, in an article about an "ethical revolution" I say there can be no new nothing except more new enemies in a world war economy.

"Depending on what these terms mean, sustainability could, at one extreme, mean to 'exploit as much as desired without infringing on future ability to exploit as much as desired' - what might be called vulgar sustainability. It is crude, obscene, lacks moderation and taste."

This paragraph reveals a fatal attachment to the old-paradigm misapprehension and presents a false choice. It's exploitation itself that is unsustainable. "Vulgar," "crude" and "obscene" as descriptors miss the mark completely. It is ignorance that underlies the notion that moderating exploitation is an optional response to the massive challenges we face. There is enlightened sustainability and there is unsustainability. We've tried unsustainability.

I like most of the comments posted here so far. Clearly y'all are intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate people. We need more of you. LOTS more.

I'm a crackpot inventor working on a novel energy source, and I have glimpsed this question but not really studied it. If my efforts succeed we will have an ideal source of energy, but that raises the question of how we would use it.

I fear we might well regard it as license to continue, or even to expand, our profligate lifestyle, to have more children and use up other resources, leading perhaps to the same kind of catastrophe we can now see coming. What good would it do to stop pollution if we then face mass starvation for want of arable land?

Would I be acting ethically if I were to introduce a technology over which there is no means of control? How about if I sit on it to avoid adverse consequences?

I do not think myself wise enough to answer either question.

The indigenous movement in South America gets little if any coverage in the north. One of the most effective things we can do is support the people still struggling for traditional lands that are being taken by transnational industries.

http://www.cimi.org.br/?system=news&action=read&id=4356&eid=340

The Guarani are seeking international awareness of the impact of monoculture on tekohá - traditional lands. They have called for the Amazon Fund to move beyond halting deforestation and into biome restoration. These are ancestral forest stewards - the Guarani language still appears in medical dictionaries - the taxonomy system exceeds that of the west in terms stringency of identification. Monoculture is putting them in çoncentration camps' - genocide is recognized by the UN
http://www.cimi.org.br/?system=news&eid=364

boycott mass consumption. small is beautiful

This is a very good article. It touches on an age old problem of how virtue is taught.
Having been in the energy conservation field for many years I disagree that advances made in this area have only been used to build bigger houses. For many people just coming to an awareness of how energy is wasted starts them on a journey that touches on how we humans live in the world. Granted the culture as Sioux Rose well points out is poisoned deeply at the roots, for some countering this starts with understanding the importance conserving the electricity and gas we use.

Some people go no further than looking at the dollars they save, for others it opens a new world of frugality and appreciation for our household impact on the environment.

"real people living their lives"(George Nash, *Reappraising the Right*)--that's the problem. And the problem points to a lack, a fault in the living of those lives. What is this lack, how so the fault? Paying for a wee bit o' wisdom rather than all that worthless stuff would answer that question and provide the resources to do something about it.
Here's a freebie to prime the pump: Aldo Leopold's land ethic --to value the whole not just a part or two.
Talk about an existential dilemma!

This article asks the right questions. Sustainability is not possible merely by buying new products and awaiting new technologies. And we must begin with the indisputable philosophical premise that humankind is not separate from nature, and therefore it is a false dichotomy to posit human exploitation of nature that benefits humans but not nature. But we live by exploiting resources. The question is where do we draw the line? I would argue that the way of life imposed by consumer capitalism, of atomized individuals living in boxes, or atomized families living in boxes, is inherently unsustainable and problematic. The same goes for the private automobile, which emerged from this same economic paradigm. We are witnessing an explosion of interest in intentional communities today because people find consumer capitalism unsatisfying. Many are also all-too-aware of the precariousness of the global food production system, and seeing the wisdom of learning to grow some of their own food. And in a time of economic decline, communities offer a much reduced cost of living through people sharing expenses of property taxes, property insurance, and maintenance and repair costs of common physical infrastructure.

Thank you for this wonderful article, gentlemen. In particular, thank you for the six questions with which you closed it. Very powerful stuff.